Services

Metrica Labs offers a range of services primarily relating to Web servers and supporting infrastructure. The main areas are Project Management, System Building, System Enhancement and Debugging, and System Tuning.

Project Management

We have had long experience defining and managing a wide variety of projects both in internal organizations and in loosely related teams of external contributors. We can assemble a team or work with yours. top

System Building

New Systems

For applications and environments that can be constructed from existing components, Metrica Labs can select hardware and software, then install, configure, and test the resulting system.

Exploratory Investigations

Highly dynamic and high-performance systems can be difficult to configure. Sometimes, it can be advantageous or even essential to perform a scaling analysis of a proposed system or system modification. At one end of the complexity scale, the scaling analysis can be a simple extrapolation of today's throughput measurements into the future using standard analytical queueing models. At the other end of the scale, it may be necessary to perform a full-scale functional throughput simulation in some detail. We have successfully employed both methods on the design of networking routers, large network configurations, storage subsystems, and server designs. top

System Enhancement and Debugging

For years, Microsoft application software has had the advantage of operating in a closed environment controlled by Microsoft as well. This permitted them to make use of features whose existence and optimal use was known only within the company.

The advent of robust and reliable open-source operating systems and databases has given everyone the advantage Microsoft once held tightly.

Both enhancements and bug fixes can be tackled successfully by the motivated adopter of open-source technologies. There is no need to wait for the attention of the sole vendor. All it takes is the expertise and desire. Metrica Labs can bring expertise to bear in both areas. top

System Tuning

Metrica Labs's performance analysis and tuning has accelerated many types of systems. Traditionally, this has involved the analysis of traces and the statistics of counters. The result has usually been the discovery of one or two design or implementation errors that have had big consequences. A combination of unbiased measurement with scientific analysis always leads to the solution.

As noted in our product preview sidebar, we believe that the DTrace tool of Solaris will be a very exciting addition to the toolkit of performance analysis. We look forward to applying it to any sluggish system running on Solaris. top

Product Preview

Metrica Labs has been recognized for quality performance analysis and enhancement. We are always looking for better ways to improve our customers' systems performance. Therefore, when we learned of the new DTrace capability in Sun's Solaris 10, we recognized it as a tremendous opportunity for advancing the state of the performance analyst's art.

Seeking Performance

Advances can make new demands,, however. DTrace exposes all of the internal workings of the system, from the kernel and device drivers up to user code. Thus, direct application of the raw tool requires a fairlly deep level of understanding on the part of the analyst which is hardly universal.

DTrace Solution

We are therefore building a suite of programs that joins our expertise in performance analysis with the DTrace capability. The aim is to provide just the right level of support for common tasks, while tapping into our existing statistical analysis and queuing modeling tools.